Female Gothic Writing: "Under Cover to Alice"

Frances L. Restuccia

Genre, 19:3 (Fall 1986), 245-64

{245}

"[T]he process of criticism is not so much an interpretation of
content as it is a revealing of it, a laying bare, a restoration
of the original message, the original experience, beneath the
distortions of the censor: and this revelation takes the form of
an explanation why the content was so distorted.
. . ."

-- Fredric Jameson, "Metacommentary"

The gothic fable,
according to Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American
Novel, is "committed to portraying the power of darkness."
And the power of darkness, in Fiedler's conception at least,
seems to be gender-bound: "the fully developed gothic centers
not in the heroine (the persecuted principle of salvation) but
in the villain (the persecuting principle of damnation)"
(108-09). Fiedler's Oedipal theory of the gothic, not
surprisingly, defines a specifically male genre: "the guilt
which underlies the gothic and motivates its plots is the guilt
of the revolutionary haunted by the (paternal) past which he has
been striving to destroy; and the fear that possesses the gothic
and motivates its tone is the fear that in destroying the old
ego-ideals of Church and State, the West has opened a way for
the irruption of darkness: for insanity and the disintegration
of the self" (Love and Death 109). Although Mrs. Radcliffe, Fiedler
grants, first made a success of gothic fiction, "These deeper
implications are barely perceptible in [her] gently spooky
fiction . . . in which terror is allayed by the final
pages, all inruptions of the irrational rationally explained
away" (Love and Death 109). Mrs. Radcliffe isn't spooky
enough, while Matthew Lewis'
work, in contrast, unveils the full "absurdity" and "outrageous
violence" of the genre instigated by Horace Walpole.

A female writer of Fiedlerian gothic fiction is unimaginable; the
genre as Fiedler characterizes it serves as a reservoir of
strictly male desire, anxiety, neurosis. Though the chief symbol
of the gothic is the Maiden in {246} flight, all she turns out to
emblematize is "the uprooted soul of the artist, the spirit of
the man who has lost his moral home" (Love and Death 111).
And Fiedler means man. The haunted castles and abbeys,
where the chase often reaches a climax, symbolize authority in
ruin: "such crumbling edifices project the world of collapsed
ego-ideals through which eighteenth-century man was groping his
proud and terrified way" (Love and Death 112).
Eighteenth-century sons, not daughters, in Fiedler's tunnel
vision, groped their proud and terrified way. Gothic fiction
articulates the son's fear of Daddy: "Children of an age which
had killed kings and bishops, cast down the holy places of their
fathers [clearly not the revolutionary work of women of the
time], found it hard to convince themselves that specters did not
walk with rattling chains, or that ancestral pictures did not
bleed." Simultaneously, gothic fiction (complicating the Oedipal
pattern) articulates the son's fear of Mommy: "Beneath the
haunted castle lies the dungeon keep: the womb from whose
darkness the ego first emerged, the tomb to which it knows it
must return at last. Beneath the crumbling shell of paternal
authority, lies the maternal blackness, imagined by the gothic
writer as a prison, a torture chamber" (Love and Death
112) -- not a maternal image likely to take shape from a female
pen.1 No
matter what the rebellion lashes out against, it appears to
belong to the son. In his introduction to The Monk, John
Berryman writes, "Matilda too is an engrossing character
. . . . But Ambrosio is the point; the point is to
conduct a remarkable man utterly to damnation" (13).

Perhaps Fiedler's tunnel vision is appropriate, ironically apt
after all. Perhaps women writers had nothing, wanted nothing,
to do with all this -- guilt and fear of darkness, insanity, the
disintegrating self, blood and the womb-tomb. These
preoccupations may actually be a male indulgence; certainly male
writers depict male characters indulging in them, as part in
fact of a male genealogy. Fiedler's gothic hero-villain is "a
descendant of Lovelace
. . . though of a Lovelace regarded with tenderness rather than
contempt" (Love and Death 113). He is a Byronic figure, or, to put it
another way that Fiedler puts it, the product of the "imposition
of the myth of Faust upon the archetype of Don Juan. Both mythic
figures, to be sure, possessed the imagination of Europe at the
point when men became for the first time conscious of the
unconscious; and both represent the revolutionary reversal of
ethical standards which followed" (Love and Death
113-14). Female models are absent; heroic women are out of the
gory gothic gallery. The gothic hero-villain is {247} Promethean; he is Satanic. The very act of
writing a gothic, rather than a sentimental, novel (women's
domain), is itself a Faustian enterprise. Gothic
writers substitute terror for love.

The Fiedlerian gothic writer is dedicated to the abominable,
moreover to the abominable in excess (and here women do creep
in, receiving the only role the paradigm allows them): "It is
not enough that his protagonist commit rape; he must commit it
upon his mother or sister; and if he himself is a cleric,
pledged to celibacy, his victim a nun, dedicated to God, all the
better!" (Love and Death 115). Fiedler sees Sade's work
as representing the "final abomination for which the gothic
yearns" (Love and Death 115-16). No, Mrs. Radcliffe does
not fit in, but proves to be the exception. Fiedler asserts that
"Despite its early adoption by Mrs. Radcliffe, the gothic is an
avant-garde genre" (Love and Death 116) that "play[s]
with horror" (Love and Death 121), that shows fascination
for supposedly condemned fantasies of seduction and rape. Even
if they wished to, women writers could hardly play in this
particular literary ballgame.

Fiedler hears the loud, boastful cry of the gothicist sons to
their fathers, "we will be terrified no more," rising
from the crackling pages of the gothic text. His ears are closed
to the daughterly voices ringing out in neighboring gothic
literature. Of course, the possibility of a female gothic is
ruled out by Fiedler's definition; but several
turn-of-the-century novels by women are also terrorized, and
also manage to assert "we will be terrified no more," even if
the message is delivered under cover. Then what kept Fiedler
from defining the gothic in such a way as to make it possible
for a woman to write one authentically? Perhaps the shift in
what the woman gothicist fears -- not just the father but the
father and his son -- is necessarily accompanied by a shift in
tone that keeps the gothic element obscured. The rebellious son
sees, in the overthrow of his father, the imminence of
irrationality, insanity, and death. But the woman gothicist sees
in her own terror before the monstrous injustices of patriarchy
only the commonplace; in the son's overthrow of the father, she
observes only the normal course of events and the
reestablishment of patriarchy in a new generation. As the gothic
aspect of a woman's life (as Charlotte Perkins Gilman would
later demonstrate in "The Yellow Wallpaper") is all in its
normality, what is monstrous in male gothic writing naturally
reappears in female gothic as frighteningly familiar.

The result is that Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, Anne
Brontë in The {248} Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, and Mary Shelley
in Frankenstein (not to mention other female gothic
writers I will not treat) are situated in a curious double bind.
How does the rebellious female gothicist strike out against the
patriarchy in the face of a male gothic tradition whose own
rebellion against the patriarchy either excludes or demolishes
her? In the first place, on the most rudimentary level, she
restores and makes central the female whom the male gothicist
had first marginalized and then killed off. The female gothic
author at this point finds herself, like her heroine, in
contradictory relationship to the gothic hero-villain as he
enters her text. On the one hand, she identifies with his
struggle against patriarchy; on the other she resents his abuse
of women and thus condemns (however subtly) his cruelty. Rather
than trading terror for terror (that is, adopting the son's
terrorizing in place of the father's), she casts a judgmental
light on the son, exposing him to be just about as ghastly as
the father. The female gothicist, then, simultaneously writes
the gothic and sabotages it, oscillating between a scenario that
indicts the "father" and a scenario that indicts the "son." A
male gothic in miniature often surfaces within and eventually is
swallowed up by the female gothic frame, the ingestion of which
signifies the female gothicist's ambivalence -- destroying it
but taking it in -- toward male gothicism.

i

Northanger Abbey (1818) supplies one reason for Austen's
fascination with coding, concealing, or just plain not saying
what she means, because this apparently amusing and inoffensive
novel finally expresses an indictment of patriarchy that could
hardly be considered proper or even permissible in Austen's
day."

-- Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the
Attic

The code-work of Jane
Austen's female gothic novel, Northanger Abbey,
commences in its paronomastic title: we are to look closely for
"anger in abeyance," for latent anger.2 Austen's anger is the buried
treasure of her gothic text: often it is through expressing what
she is not upset about that she hints at what is bothering her.
An early example of this sets the novel in motion: Mr. Morland
is introduced in the first few lines of the book as being "not
in the least addicted to locking up his daughters" (NA 37).
Apparently, the implication seems to be, most fathers are.
Turning to Mrs. Morland: as her daughter prepares to {249}
journey to Bath (early in chapter two), she does not feel "A
thousand alarming presentiments of evil to her beloved
Catherine", she fails to caution her daughter "against the
violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing
young ladies away to some remote farm-house" (NA 41). But Mrs.
Morland lacks these anxious fantasies only because she is
ignorant of "lords and baronets": "she entertained no notion of
their general mischievousness, and was [therefore] wholly
unsuspicious of danger to her daughter from their machinations"
(NA 41). Already Austen has, albeit quietly, set the stage for
abuse of women by fathers and aristocrats.

In fact, more than "general mischievousness" but rather "General
tyranny" takes place in Northanger Abbey. The dominant
and domineering patriarchal figure of the novel commits all
sorts of offenses against not only his wife but Eleanor and
Catherine as well. Even in General Tilney's most banal gesture,
there is violence: "Miss Tilney gently hinted her fear of being
late [for dinner]; and in half a minute [she and Catherine] ran
down stairs together, in an alarm not wholly unfounded for
General Tilney was pacing the drawing-room, his watch in his
hand and having, on the very instant of their entering, pulled
the bell with violence, ordered 'Dinner to be on table
directly!'" (NA 171). His despotism subsequently gets
more insidious: "the General recovering his politeness
. . . spent the rest of his time in scolding his
daughter, for so foolishly hurrying her fair friend" (NA 171).
Though nothing as gross as beating or rape occurs, there is
nevertheless a form of violence against women in this and later
scenes. The General prohibits Eleanor from showing Catherine
Mrs. Tilney's bed-chamber; and when they transgress his law, his
booming voice is heard: "the dreaded figure of the General
. . . stood before her! The name of 'Eleanor' at the
same moment, in his loudest tone, resounded through the
building, giving to his daughter the first intimation of his
presence, and to Catherine terror upon terror" (NA 194).
Admittedly, Catherine may be easily terrorized and General
Tilney's outbursts may seem humorously short-lived and
blustering; still, there is reason to question whether Catherine
has gone overboard in perceiving the late Mrs. Tilney as an
imprisoned and "injured wife."

There are injuries, and there are lesser injuries that are
nonetheless injurious. In fact, Catherine receives some support
from the son in her {250} criticism of the father. Henry
Tilney's ambiguous but incriminating words corroborate her
intuition that at least something was out of kilter between the
Tilneys: "He loved her, I am persuaded, as well as it was
possible for him to -- We have not all, you know, the same
tenderness of disposition -- and I will not pretend to say that
while she lived, she might not often have had much to bear, but
though his temper injured her, his judgment never did" (NA 199).
Henry's vocabulary suggests that Catherine has in a way located
the "injured and ill-fated nun," memorials of which she had been
hoping to discover. And yet, Henry's support of Catherine's
criticism of the father is lukewarm at best, his loyalties being
divided. Though his impulse is to criticize/overthrow the
father/patriarch, when the consequence of that move is sympathy
for women, he holds back. A woman ought to be satisfied, it
appears, to be abused verbally, if she be fairly judged.

It is plain to all readers of Northanger Abbey that
Catherine's gothic fantasy -- in the male mode -- gets
punctured. Its deflation signals Austen's metamorphosis of
"male horrors" to "female horrors," her gradual shifting of the
spotlight from the fantastical things that men find horrible (or
at least that they use to image their terrified psychological
condition) to the less fantastical things that women find
horrible, which are all the more awful because less fantastical.
Realistically-minded at the close of the novel, Catherine
herself judges the General's wickedness. Rudely thrown out of
the Abbey, she experiences firsthand the novel's translation of
conventional gothic terror into the terror of mundane acts of
abuse on the part of powerful men against powerless women:3 "how different
now the source of her inquietude from what it had been
. . . how mournfully superior in reality and substance! Her anxiety
had foundation in fact, her fears in probability; and with a
mind so occupied in the contemplation of actual and natural
evil, the solitude of her situation, the darkness of her
chamber, the antiquity of the building were felt and considered
without the smallest emotion; and though the wind was high, and
often produced strange and sudden noises throughout the house,
she heard it all as she lay awake, hour after hour, without
curiosity or terror" (NA 225). Having suffered the General's
cruelty, Catherine now has more than a high wind to worry about:
there are familiar monsters on the loose. Finally it is made
fairly explicit that Catherine's inflated, dramatic suspicions
of the General serve as a code to convey the real modern
barbarities of male behavior (and are not meant to parody her
imagination, since it is by virtue of her imagination that {251}
Catherine gets to the root of the crime[s]). Catherine hears
enough through Henry of his father's disillusionment with her to
feel that "in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or
shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his
character, or magnified his cruelty" (NA 243). With such a
proximate nemesis to grapple with, it is no wonder that
Catherine accedes to Eleanor's request that she write to her
"under cover to [Eleanor's maid] Alice" (NA 226).

And the Northanger Abbey "sons" turn out to be spitting
images of the father. The Sadean elements of the male gothic
novel are mocked in the distasteful behavior of John Thorpe. He
takes pride in mastering his horse, as he wishes to master
women: he and Catherine proceed in his carriage in the
"quietest manner imaginable . . . owing to the
peculiarly judicious manner in which he . . . held the
reins, and the singular discernment and dexterity with which he
had directed his whip" (NA 82). He is a womanizer who utters "a
short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of
every woman they met" (NA 69). And though, unlike Fiedler's
gothic villains, he avoids literal rape of mother and sister, he
attacks them verbally: "Ah mother! how do you do?
. . . where did you get that quiz of a hat, it makes
you look like an old witch?"; "On his two younger sisters he
then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal tenderness, for
he asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both
looked very ugly" (NA 70). It is indeed appropriate that John
Thorpe scorns Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
and praises The Monk.

Judging Henry Tilney is a finer matter, though he nonetheless
may be identified in spirit as a son of the General (too often
readers allow John Thorpe to function as Henry's lightning
rod). Henry's first, sarcastic remarks to Catherine ridicule
the writing of women, exactly what Austen defends in her apology
for the novel:4 he comments priggishly that
"letter-writing among women" suffers from "A general deficiency
of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent
ignorance of grammar" (NA 49). It is possible of course that
Henry only teases Catherine here, since he believes perversely
that "nothing in the world advances intimacy so much" (NA 51).
Being overly legalistic, he pompously views two partners who
agree simply to dance as entering "a contract of mutual
agreeableness for the space of an evening" (NA 94). And his
analogy between a country-dance and marriage brings out his
oppressive conservatism, his desire to hold a tight rein on his
future wife: "Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties
of both; and those {252} men who do not chuse to dance or marry
themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their
neighbours" (NA 95). Henry will tolerate no interference with
his possession of a wife. Once married, it is the responsibility
of both spouses "to endeavour to give the other no cause for
wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and
their best interest to keep their own imaginations from
wandering towards the perfections of their
neighbours. . ." (NA 95). And though this sounds
egalitarian, it is prematurely rigid; Henry entertains such
thoughts (which are catalyzed merely by John Thorpe's desire to
dance with Catherine) upon meeting Catherine for the third time.
While Catherine's imagination expands her consciousness of man's
inhumanity to woman, Henry argues immediately for restrictions
on the imagination. Henry will want his wife exclusively to
himself. A bad sign, if not a bad sentiment.

Henry's inheritance of the sins of the fathers doesn't stop
here. He condescends to Catherine in speaking of her favorite
subject, novels: "Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a
knowledge of Julias and Louisas. . . . I had entered
on my studies at Oxford, while you were a good little girl
working your sampler at home!" (NA 122). He chides her for using
the empty word "nice." He asserts, tellingly, his pedagogical
principle that effective instruction necessitates torment: "That
little girls and boys should be tormented . . . is
what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized
state can deny" (NA 124). He lectures Catherine on the
picturesque, teaching her to perceive beauty through his eyes.
And he continually makes misogynistic jokes: "I will be noble. I
will prove myself a man, no less by the generosity of my soul
than the clearness of my head. I have no patience with such of
my sex as disdain to let themselves sometimes down to the
comprehension of yours. Perhaps the abilities of women are
neither sound nor acute -- neither vigorous nor keen. Perhaps
they may want observation, discernment, judgment, fire, genius,
and wit" (NA 126-27). This is all very cute and funny, but a
moment's identification with a woman's hurt reaction to such
joking will reveal how wearisome it can be. One doesn't have to
consult Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconcious to know that whether he is joking or not Henry's
conception of manhood depends on the devaluation of
womanhood.

But Henry is not all rotten: there is a typically male gothic
Oedipal rebellion staged in Northanger Abbey that
partially redeems him. Insofar as he challenges his father's
law, Austen salutes him as brotherly and {253} heroic.
Unintimidated by the General, Henry fulfills responsibly his
plan to marry Catherine, as he "felt himself bound as much in
honour as in affection to Miss Morland . . . believing
that heart to be his own which he had been directed to gain" (NA
243). But at the same time, Austen raises our suspicion about
the extent to which this Oedipal son will carry out his
subversion of the father. Henry seems about as cool toward
Catherine as the General was toward Mrs. Tilney. His affection
originates "in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other
words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the
only cause of giving her a serious thought" (NA 240). A watered
down emotion indeed. But how surprised should we be? Catherine,
we must remember, becomes "Mrs. Tilney" -- making the novel seem
in retrospect Catherine's anticipatory nightmarish vision of
life as Mrs. Tilney. (Henry's jokes may injure Catherine, but
his judgment never will.) Ganging up with Catherine and Henry,
Austen indicts the father, the primary patriarch of the novel;
defending Catherine against Henry, she withdraws her allegiance
to him, exposing him as a patriarch like his father only in
partial disguise. A reincarnated Mrs. Tilney, Catherine gets
wedged between Tilney pere and Tilney fils. Yet Northanger
Abbey has its bright side for feminists. We may think of
Austen's story as "writing under cover" insofar as it carries
this implicit political message: beware of becoming Mrs. Tilney,
even if you distance yourself critically from the father and
side with the son.

ii

"[W]omen artists are repeatedly attracted to the Satanic/Byronic
hero even while they try to resist the sexual submission exacted
by this oppressive younger son who seems, at first, so like a
brother or a double. . . . women writers develop a
subversive tradition that has a unique relationship to the
Romantic ethos of revolt."

-- Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the
Attic

The double bind that entraps the female gothicist is illustrated
paradigmatically in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall. Infatuated with Arthur Huntingdon, the novel's
Satanic/Byronic anti-hero, Helen Graham becomes his wretched
victim. Initially, Helen is oblivious to Arthur's rudeness, and
responds passionately to his "ineffable but indefinite charm,
which cast a halo over all he did and said" (TWH 161). And yet,
as she becomes aware that "there was more of {254} conscious
power than tenderness in his demeanour" (TWH 163), Helen
discloses her affinity for his romantic brutal energy. She
rejects conventional suitors for lawless Arthur; his lawlessness
gives her a thrill. An artist with a romantic imagination, Helen
naturally feels drawn to Arthur's assaults on conformity.

But as usual the "daughter's" investment of passion in the
"son's" rebellion against the "father" -- perhaps best
characterized in this case by Fiedler's "old ego-ideals of
Church and State" -- leads to trouble. The wedding bells no
sooner stop ringing than Arthur begins his campaign of torture
against Helen: thrill becomes insufferable pain. Arthur's
abuses of Helen are rampant. He accelerates their bridal tour,
since the continental scenes are old hat to him, and since he
resents Helen's delighting in anything dissociated from him.
Setting himself up as a god, Arthur competes with Helen's
Christian God (as well as eventually with their son) for her
attention, and soon resorts to physical violence to convey to
Helen his disapproval of her reading. Discovering Helen immersed
in a book one evening, Arthur takes out his frustration on his
favorite cocker spaniel, Dash. He hurls a heavy book at its
head, wounding both the dog and Helen. Animals and women alike
are the degraded prey of this predator, a role signified
glaringly by his surname. Having hunted Helen down, Arthur
wishes to incarcerate her in their marriage. Helen spells out
his backward "idea of a wife": "a thing to love one devotedly
and to stay at home -- to wait upon her husband, and amuse him
and minister to his comfort in every possible way, while he
chooses to stay with her; and, when he is absent, to attend to
his interests, domestic or otherwise, and patiently wait his
return; no matter how he may be occupied in the meantime" (TWH
257), that is, even if he indulges in an affair, as Arthur does
with Annabella. (This novel, like Wuthering Heights,
prefigures Marilyn French's call to women in The Women's
Room to resist yielding masochistically to sadistic men, to
recognize the sickness inherent in a female's attraction to male
power over her.) Brontë thus contributes to the female
gothicist's expose of the anti-patriarchal rebel's compulsion to
torment a female victim to sustain his fight, to convince
himself of his own force, against an oppressive status quo.
Helen is sacrificed as Arthur proves his liberation from social
convention, from everything that inhibits his instinctive
drives. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall teaches the
undercover lesson of the female gothic: women must beware of the
patriarch in the anti-patriarch.

But it's not as if Arthur is the only demonic husband. His ugly
{255} propensities are spread over almost all of the novel's
male figures as part of Brontë's female gothic translation
of fantastical ghosts and goblins to human monsters who abuse
their wives. The most dramatic, terrifying moment of The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall details a husband-dominated domestic
quarrel between two less than central married characters, the
Hattersleys. The scene best illuminates Brontë's novel as a
nineteenth-century The Women's Room, with all of its
terror embodied exquisitely in the most banal events, and all of
its energy of violence and rape always about to explode.

"No matter: you shall answer my question!" exclaimed her
tormentor; and he attempted to extort the confession by shaking
her and remorsely crushing her slight arms in the gripe of his
powerful fingers. . . .

"Tell me now!" said he, with another shake and a squeeze that
made her draw in her breath and bite her lip to suppress a cry
of pain.

"I'll tell you, Mr. Hattersley," said [Helen]. "She was
crying from pure shame and humiliation for you; because she
could not bear to see you conduct yourself so disgracefully."
. . .

"Yes," she whispered, hanging her head and blushing at the awful
acknowledgement.

"Curse you for an impertinent hussy then!" cried he, throwing her
from him with such violence that she fell on her
side. . . . (TWH 289-90)

Not only this scene but finally Brontë's entire book is
about as bleak as French's, despite Helen's marriage (after
Arthur's death) to Gilbert Markham -- ostensible gentleman.5 We can be sure
that Brontë wishes us to link Arthur Huntingdon and
Gilbert, since we initially meet Gilbert, just moments before he
encounters Helen for the first time, out with his dog and gun,
hunting for hawks and carrion crows, though seeking "better
prey." To this end he heads for Wildfell (where Helen lives).
Throughout the novel Gilbert can hardly keep himself from {256}
pouncing on her: "Never had she tooked so lovely: never had my
heart so warmly cleaved to her as now. Had we been left two
minutes longer, standing there alone, I cannot answer for the
consequences" (TWH 86). Even worse, he admits unabashedly his
desire to punish Helen, to make her suffer: during a pivotal,
emotion-packed meeting between them, "though [he] saw she was
miserable, and pitied her, [he] felt glad to have it in [his]
power to torment her" (TWH 141). "'I can crush that bold
spirit,' [he thinks]. But while I secretly exulted in my power,
I felt disposed to dally with my victim like a cat" (TWH
143).

It is this, perhaps covert, sadist whom Helen marries as a happy
alternative to Arthur. Writing under cover -- just as Helen,
while occupying Wildfell Hall, has communications addressed to
her "under cover" to her brother -- Anne Brontë plants
clues that had Helen comfortably (without incurring all the
gossip and aspersions of her neighbors, without being considered
an enigmatic lady/witch) been able to remain single at Wildfell
(the female "wild zone" of the book), she would have been better
off. Helen's aunt advises her well: "matrimony is a serious
thing" (TWH 150, Brontë's emphasis); "thoughtlessness
[in a husband] may lead to every crime" (TWH 191). In turn, late
in the novel, Helen enjoins her friend Esther to "stand
firm. You might as well sell yourself to slavery at once, as
marry a man you dislike. . . . remember, you are bound
to your husband for life." Perpetual maidenhood has its appeal:
"though in single life your joys may not be very many, your
sorrows, at least, will not be more than you can bear. Marriage
may change your circumstances for the better, but in my
private opinion, it is far more likely to produce a contrary
result" (TWH 380). The novel ends conventionally both in social
and artistic terms, as it seems it must, on the note of a
blissful marriage between Helen and Gilbert (according to
Gilbert anyway, who takes over the narrative at the end, burying
Helen's voice), but its radical gothic critique of marriage and
men subverts the flimsy, pretty conclusion.

Anne Brontë makes her main point twice, perhaps to show
that the paradox is inescapable: liberating anti-patriarchs
metamorphose into repressive patriarchs once the "weaker vessel"
finds them appealing. Initially seductive, Arthur turns out to
be a brute. Ostensibly a gentleman, Gilbert turns out to be a
version of Arthur, a merely less blatant brute. Brontë
shows that the brutality which is taken to be the opposite of
gentlemanliness inheres in gentlemanliness. Hence the rebel
against patriarchy (the brute) is revealed to be the constituent
of patriarchy (the {257} gentleman). And the corollary of this
absorption of the gothic into normality is that the terrorized
gothic victim is secretly identified as the normally happy
wife.

iii

"'Terror made me cruel,' says Lockwood; 'and, finding it useless
to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to
the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran
down and soaked the bedclothes. . . .'"

"'Terror made me cruel. . . .' Is Emily
Brontë a 'Terrorist,' as the first Gothic novelists were
called?"

-- Ellen Moers, Literary Women

Ellen Moers is right to place Emily Brontë's Wuthering
Heights "uneasily" in the gothic tradition. But the novel
fits even less felicitously (into the male gothic canon) than
she supposes. Moers writes that Brontë accepts "the cruel
as a normal, almost an invigorating component of human life."
She argues that "The Gothic vice of sadism is an extreme and
pervasive feature of Wuthering Heights," without
identifying particular sadists. They aren't female. Yet Moers
seems to accept and appreciate the thought that the
eccentricities of the gothic tradition are "indigenous to
'woman's fantasy.'" She goes even further: "In Wuthering
Heights those female 'eccentricities' must be called by a
stronger name: perversities" (99-100). But from whom does the
cruelty, sadism, and perversity actually issue in Brontë's
novel? Who enjoys it? Lockwood's indulgence in cruelty because
he is terrified hardly makes Brontë a "Terrorist." Why is
it so hard to disentangle the victim from the victimizer in this
book?

One reason might be that Heathcliff, Brontë's chief sadist,
seduces not only Catherine and Isabella but readers and critics
as well. Even feminist critics. Gilbert and Gubar read
Heathcliff as "what Elaine Showalter calls 'a woman's man,' a
male figure into which a female artist projects in disguised
form her own anxieties about her sex and its meaning in her
society" (294). Such projection no doubt operates in
Wuthering Heights. Certainly in the beginning, Catherine
expresses the fullest imaginable solidarity with Heathcliff in
her famous statements to Nelly: "he's more myself than I am" and
"I am Heathcliff -- he's always, always in my mind
. . . as my own being" (WH 72, 74). Heathcliff
embodies Catherine's (and surely Brontë's) impulse for
nature (over culture), for freedom, and for full release of her
wildness, as Arthur in The {258} Tenant of Wildfell
Hall does at the outset for Helen. Like most female
gothicists, then, Emily Brontë partly identifies with the
gothic hero-villain. But Heathcliff eventually proves to be
traitorous; he damages women at least as much as he represents
them.

So while I grant that Catherine identifies with the
Byronic/Satanic anti-hero (rather than the restrictive
patriarchal world of Thrushcross Grange) in the first place, as
the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that the bind is double.
Catherine's ability to play chameleon keeps her free and alive
for a while, as she oscillates between Thrushcross Grange and
Wuthering Heights: "In the place where she heard Heathcliff
termed a 'vulgar young ruffian,' and 'worse than a brute,' she
took care not to act like him; but at home she had small
inclination to practise politeness that would only be laughed
at, and restrain an unruly nature when it would bring her
neither credit nor praise" (WH 62). But eventually she is ground
to death by the jaws of the female gothic double bind.

That the Victorian world of manners located at Thrushcross
Grange crushes Catherine's spirit by binding her in ladyhood is
rarely contested; the less popular position is that Heathcliff
is complicit in the crime. And yet, through her death Catherine
points a finger at, and attempts to spite, both Edgar and
Heathcliff. Even when her thoughts fail to name Heathcliffs
misdeed, Catherine predicts punishment for both men: "Well, if I
cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend, if Edgar will be mean and
jealous, I'll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. That
will be a prompt way of finishing all" (WH 101). On her deathbed
Catherine attempts to wound Heathcliff with the charge: "You and
Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff! And you both come to
bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to be pitied! I
shall not pity you, not I. You have killed me -- and thriven on
it, I think" (WH 132). Inappropriate and indecent as it is,
Heathcliff and Catherine have at this dire time a fierce
quarrel. Her behavior toward him belies the sentimental notion
that she cares for him in the end purely as her childhood
brother/lover. During her last minutes to live, Catherine's
"present countenance had a wild vindictiveness in its white
cheek . . ." (WH 133).

Heathcliff, of course, may have turned against Catherine
initially because she turned against him and toward Edgar, but
that point fails to explain her vindictiveness. By the
end Catherine appears to apprehend the intrinsic ruthlessness,
the sadism, of her Byronic/Satanic boyfriend: at her bedside
when Heathcliff lets go of Catherine's arm, "four distinct
impressions left blue in the colourless skin" (WH 133). The
monstrosity {259} of his behavior in the course of the novel far
outweighs that of her infidelity to him; and her growing
hostility toward him remains inexplicable if she is the one at
fault. Though it could be argued that Catherine's rejection of
Heathcliff triggers his meanness toward her and in turn her
condemnation of him, his meanness surpasses the vengefulness
that such rejection might elicit. In her Preface to the New
Edition of Wuthering Heights (1850), Charlotte
Brontë picks up on Heathcliffs devilishness -- a
fiendishness that transcends mere ire over Catherine's marriage
to Edgar: "Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once
swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition, from the
time when 'the little black-haired, swarthy thing, as dark as if
it came from the Devil,' was first unrolled out of the bundle
and set on its feet in the farm-house kitchen, to the hour when
Nelly Dean found the grim, stalwart corpse laid on its back in
the panel-enclosed bed, with wide-gazing eyes that seemed 'to
sneer at her attempt to close them, and parted lips and sharp
white teeth that sneered too!'" (WH 11). Though on the verge of
metamorphosing into Dracula, Heathcliff remains human, but even
human devils make relentless partners for women, whether or not
they share a common foe.

Brontë imbues Heathcliff with evil incommensurate with
Catherine's criticism and rejection of him -- a sadism that
reveals that he would have been no more conducive to Catherine's
happiness than Edgar. Isabella can testify to this, as
Heathcliff shows his truest villainous colors in his treatment
of her. And Catherine seems fully cognizant of the depths of his
nastiness. She lashes out against Heathcliff to protect her new
sister:

"I wouldn't be you for a kingdom, then!" Catherine declared,
emphatically -- and she seemed to speak sincerely. "Nelly, help
me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is
-- an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without
cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I'd as
soon put that little canary into the park on a winter's day as
recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable
ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes
that dream enter your head. Pray don't imagine that he conceals
depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior!
He's not a rough diamond -- a pearl-containing oyster of a
rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. . . .
he'd crush you, like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you
a troublesome charge." (WH 89-90)

Through Isabella's torturous experience, Brontë lets us in
on what Catherine's experience was apt to have been. Like
Lockwood who prior to the events of the novel shrinks "icily
into [himself], like a snail" once the {260} "goddess" he adores
on the beach takes an interest in him (WH 15), Heathcliff only
shows signs of passion for Catherine because she remains
inaccessible.

Brontë even has Heathcliff himself elaborate his
wickedness. "The first thing [Isabella] saw me do, on coming
out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog; and when she
pleaded for it the first words I uttered were a wish that I had
the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one:
possibly she took that exception for herself. But no brutality
disgusted her. I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if
only her precious person were secure from injury!" Heathcliff
despises Isabella for being "an abject thing," for her ability
to "endure," and to "creep shamefully cringing back!" (WH 127).
By having Heathcliff admit to a consciousness of his mystique as
gothic hero-villain (he tells Catherine that Isabella abandoned
Thrushcross Grange "under a delusion . . . picturing
in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences
from my chivalrous devotion" [WH 126]), Brontë clinches her
de-mystification of his charm. There is something about
his cognizance and articulation of the romantic myth that
ensnares Isabella that turns the stomach one last time. Isabella
learns the hardest way that Heathcliff is a "lying fiend, a
monster, and not a human being!" (WH 128). But her mistake here
highlights the worst thing of all: unfortunately, Heathcliff is
a human being. Brontë makes the female gothicist's most
hair-raising point that some fiends aren't supernatural.

I take this to be the undercover message of specifically Nelly
Dean's story. Familiar with the library as well as with the ways
of the world, Nelly is equipped to recount her female gothic
story, as she does "in true gossip's fashion" (WH 59).6 She spins out
a tale of woe for women, in which she tries to offset the
pattern of female subjugation to male authority and power with
her strength and common sense.

Clearly Nelly's maneuvers are limited; but seen in this light,
they bespeak a crucial message for women. Her efforts (however
unsuccessful) work toward pulling women up out of the gothic
sadistic theatre of their everyday lives. For example, Nelly's
silence about Heathcliff's overhearing Catherine's fatal
criticism of him -- which leads to his disappearance and, one
might fairly assume, to her marriage to Edgar -- suggests that
for all her camaraderie with Heathcliff she, like Catherine
toward the end of the novel, suspects his capacity for kindness
to Catherine. Nelly consciously ruptures their relationship,
wisely knowing its futility. And her failure later on in the
book to relay to Edgar news of the seriousness of {261}
Catherine's illness might be seen as part of her dogged hope,
her insistence that Catherine will simply regain her health,
will stand on her two feet, and stop carrying on, stop
destroying herself to spite the men. (Nelly's plan, of course,
backfires.)

In an essay placed prominently at the back of the Norton edition
of Wuthering Heights, John Mathison accuses Nelly of
being too "good-natured, warmhearted, wholesome, practical, and
physically healthy" to be able adequately to narrate the story
of Catherine and Heathcliff (334), but perhaps her heartiness is
meant as an antidote to the particular illnesses that
Brontë portrays -- Catherine's anorexia and ultimate
self-destructiveness, and Isabella's self-destructive attraction
to villain-heroes. From a feminist point of view, the
perspective that because of Nelly "we are constantly directed
toward feeling the inadequacy of the wholesome [that Nelly
represents], and toward sympathy with genuine passions [which to
Mathison Nelly cannot appreciate], no matter how destructive or
violent" begins to look a little conspiratorial (Mathison 353).
Insisting on reading Wuthering Heights as a sick male
gothic novel in the Fiedlerian tradition (in which the
passionate rebellion of male heroes reigns supreme despite, or
even perhaps by virtue of, the damage they do, most often to
female victims), Mathison misses the lesson of the female gothic
-- Nelly's lesson -- that one doesn't have to look to the
supernatural world to find male fiends, and that therefore until
feminism is at the heart of the rebellion women should steer
clear of the charisma of gothic rebels. The shepherd boy's
vision at the end of Wuthenng Heights of "Heathcliff and
a woman" (WH 265) indicates that the only world in which women
can consort with male rebels and retain their status as women is
a ghostly one. What the male gothic writer locates beyond death
-- giants, ghosts, demons, etc. -- the female gothic writer
locates in real life; and what the male gothic writer imagines
in life -- admirable young heroes -- the female gothic writer
can only imagine in yet unrealized kingdoms.

iv

The male gothic urge to exclude, even to abolish, women is
exposed also in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley dramatizes the
horrifying results of the desire for a kind of Hisland -- almost every male
character in {262} the novel finds men more appealing than
women. In the opening epistles, Robert Walton writes to his
sister, Margaret, that he is friendless and thus longs for "the
company of a man who could sympathize with [him], whose eyes
would reply to [his]" (F
273). (One might have expected those eyes to be womanly.)
And no sooner is Victor rescued and brought on ship than Walton
begins "to love him as a brother" (F 282).

Women do enter the picture as tools for male bonding. Victor
Frankenstein's father loved a man named Beaufort to the point
that two years after the friend's death, Mr. Frankenstein
married Beaufort's daughter, in whose loving and caring arms
Beaufort passed away. "Tried worth" and "gratitude," rather than
passion, motivate him. It is as if through marrying Caroline
Mr. Frankenstein unites spiritually with his beloved friend.
Safie similarly gains value as she is exchanged between men. She
is the "treasure" that her Turkish merchant father rewards Felix
with for Felix's help in freeing him from prison in France.8

Even the novel's rebel against patriarchy is not, as a result,
attracted to women: Victor seems drawn to Henry Clerval more
than he is to Elizabeth. Early in the book, Mrs. Frankenstein
offers Elizabeth to Victor as "a pretty present" (F 293). And Elizabeth never
becomes anything more to Victor than a "gift," a
taken-for-granted "possession," a "more than sister" (F 294). Both Mr. Frankenstein
and Elizabeth are embarrassed by his lack of sexual drive toward
her.

Victor, of course, has thrown all of his fervor into having a
baby before their marriage and without Elizabeth, into taking on
the roles of both parents. He refers to his creation of the
"monster" as the product of "painful labour," but what he
produces is not merely female reproduction. He describes the
"birth" of his passion behind the act in terms of a combination
of male arousal and pregnancy: it arose "like a mountain river,
from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but, swelling as it
proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept
away all [his] hopes and joys" (F
297).

The trouble is that Victor fails miserably at motherhood. The
novel depicts the abysmal inadequacy of an ambitious,
Byronic/Satanic male scientist's nurturing abilities. Victor
commits crimes against domesticity (he himself admits that no
pursuit should be allowed "to interfere with the tranquillity of
. . . domestic affections" [F 316],
as his certainly does), and against the sanctity of the mother-
or parent-child bond. Shelley measures the Byronic/Satanic
anti-hero against the yardstick of conventional female domestic
values, and he proves to be inept. She {263} extends to Victor
the privilege of giving birth, identifying him as a potential
"woman's man," but ends up punishing him for his desire to usurp
the female by eschewing her nurturing values rather than
adopting them.9 Which brings us once more to a
central point of women's gothic writing: that although women
share with Romantic sons a subordinate position vis-a-vis the
establishment -- the "old ego-ideals of Church and State," which
Victor challenges in attempting to create life and thereby
rivaling the Creator -- Romantic sons and womanhood, in this
case specifically motherhood, don't mix. In Frankenstein
it's not just a matter of a mere lack of affinity: part of
Victor's rebellion seems to necessitate rendering the woman
irrelevant. He wants to play the role of the supreme patriarch
(God) who doesn't need a matriarch.10
But there is one male in the story who craves a female.
The creature pleads with Victor for a "companion," and she
doesn't have to be gorgeous. He wants her as a partner in a
balanced relationship and as a lifeline to humankind. He yearns
to "live in communion with an equal . . . [to] feel
the affections of a sensitive being and become linked to the
chain of existence" (F 415).
(Victor finally has no sympathy for such a craving; his misogyny
explodes into violence when he tears to pieces the female
creature he had begun to make. "The remains of the half-finished
creature, whom [he] had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor,
and [he] almost felt as if [he] had mangled the living flesh of
a human being." He puts "the relics of [his] work
. . . into a basket, with a great quantity of stones"
and hurls them into the sea [F
440-41].) And not only does the creature crave a woman, but
he possesses a womanliness that precludes his own misogyny. He
lacks a history as women lack a history of their own; he
represents a woman's helplessness in a male-dominated society
and he is acutely aware of the defects of his body as a woman is
trained to be. The creature (rather than Heathcliff or Victor)
serves as Showalter's "woman's man," into whom Shelley has
projected overtly her anxieties about being a woman.

Yet all of the creature's feminine qualities are not sources of
anxiety. Some, on the contrary, are celebrated, offered as
alternatives superior to qualities typical of the gothic
anti-hero. The creature is the female gothicist's best answer to
the destructiveness and misogyny of the gothic hero-villain. He
is an improvement upon Henry, Arthur, Heathcliff, Victor, Byron,
Satan, etc. insofar as: he has a fine, gentle, poetic
sensibility (he likes music, including the song of birds;
appreciates form; responds to beauty [loves flowers]); he values
domestic, civilized order {264} (after watching Agatha do her
housekeeping in the cottage, he arranges his hovel-dwelling and
carpets it with straw); he feels deep emotion (he is moved by
the goodness of the DeLacey family and in turn is benevolent
toward them); he appreciates nature; he is self-conscious about
his identity; he learns and loves language, and writes. In
Frankenstein Shelley offers what we might think of (not
as a son but) as a grandson of the patriarchy, a feminized son
of the putative anti-patriarchal son, a grandson who doesn't at
long last find patriarchal behavior and values alluring.11
Perhaps female gothicists were attracted to male rebels in the
first place because of the overwhelming obstacles obstructing
their own rebellion. Let's hook up with the already active
revolutionaries, they may have naively said to themselves. But
they appear eventually to locate, and thus wish to expose, in
their male comrades fidelity to the power structures against
which those male comrades supposedly rebel: Romantic sons insist
on power over women just as their fathers insisted on power over
them. The competition is for control of the patriarchy; neither
side is finally anti-patriarchal. So female gothic writers found
themselves absorbing and undermining the gothic to articulate
the paradox of the patriarchal anti-patriarch. Mary Shelley,
however, devised a way of creating an anti-patriarchal anti-hero
uninterested in becoming another patriarch. But the only rebel
she could invent outside of the mutually reinforcing father-son
hegemonies is an independent-minded "monster" -- not a woman.
(Her reasoning may have been that if real men are monstrous and
treacherous, then maybe monsters are the only allies to be
trusted!) Perhaps this is why the "feminism" of the female
gothic took the form of subversion of the subversive. The law of
the so-called lawless son proved to be about as formidable as
the law of the father. But by bringing the gothic home, female
gothicists were at least surreptitiously able to say so.

Notes

1. The gothic son's fear of the "mother" not
only complicates the Oedipal pattern but suggests Freud's
"negative Oedipus," in which the son wishes to murder the
"mother" to get to the "father." Fiedler's speculation may
actually imply a negative Oedipal theory since the gothic son's
desire to subvert the "father" may be equally motivated (as I
argue later on) by a desire to take his place. Veeder (366)
applies Freud's negative Oedipus to Shelley's
Frankenstein.

2. Although Austen's brother chose the title of
the novel after her death, Austen (obviously) chose the name
"Northanger Abbey" for the primary edifice of the book in which
General Tilney dispenses his cruelty.

3. My reading of Northanger Abbey is
meant to supplement that of Gilbert and Gubar. I excluded from
my discussion their by now famous reading of the laundry list
(128-45).

4. Austen's focus, in Chapter V, is on women
novelists. She, in fact, aligns novelists with Mrs. Tilney --
"Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body"
(my emphasis) -- and alludes to Fanny Burney and Maria
Edgeworth as part of her defense: "'Oh! it is only a novel!'
replies the young lady. . . . 'It is only Cecilia, or
Camilla, or Belinda;' or, in short, only some work in which the
greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most
thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of
its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are
conveyed to the world in the best chosen language" (NA 58).
Austen's apology for women's writing would, therefore, lead one
to doubt that Northanger Abbey is a spoof on Mrs.
Radcliffe's Udolpho.

5. It must be kept in mind that gentleman
Gilbert attacks Mr. Lawrence with a whip "garnished with a
massive horse's head of plated metal" (TWH 135). He feels
"savage satisfaction" on observing "the instant, deadly pallor
that overspread [Mr. Lawrence's] face, and the few red drops
that trickled down his forehead, while he reeled a moment in his
saddle, and then fell backward to the ground" (TWH 134). Gilbert
then deserts him, and later takes comfort in hearing that Mr.
Lawrence "had frightfully fractured his skull and broken a leg"
(TWH 138).

6. Nelly, the often neglected, much maligned,
maternalistic servant-narrator of most of Wuthering
Heights, tells Lockwood a striking fact about her literacy:
she has "read more than [he] would fancy . . . You
could not open a book in this library that I have not looked
into, and got something out of also, unless it be that range of
Greek and Latin, and that of French -- and those I know one from
another: it is as much as you can expect of a poor man's
daughter" (WH 59). Brontë seems to be signalling here
Nelly's intellectual capaclty to weave a narrarive with a subtle
point.

7. Veeder invokes this line from Freud's essay
on Dostoevsky (232) to sum up "Frankenstein's desire to become
Fitz-victor," a status he achieves, argues Veeder "partially by
giving birth to himself as monster" and partially by
(indirectly) "killing" his father, Alphonse. Veeder, p. 380.
Veeder makes an interesting case for this latter idea.

8. There is reason to believe that Mary Shelley
disapproved of both Safie's and her mother's lot. (Safie's
alternative to not marrying Felix is to be "immured within the
walls of a harem" [F 390];
and her mother was "made a slave by the Turks" [F 390].) For tucked away in
these tiny sub-plots, "feminism" is revealed to be on Shelley's
mind: Safie's mother "taught her [daughter] to aspire to higher
powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden ro
the female followers of Muhammed. This lady died, but her
lessons were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie" (F 390).

9. Without going into a lengthy history of
critical debate on Frankenstein, I should mention that while Moers and Gilbert
and Gubar tend to read the novel as a myth expressing the
horrors of birth, Robert Kiely (The
Romantic Novel in England) and Judith Wilt corroborate my
own sense, that, to quote Wilt who quotes Kiely, "a hidden feminism leads Mary
to punish Frankenstein for seeking "to combine the role of both
parents in one, to eliminate the need for woman in the creative
act'" (63).

10. Like Veeder, Wilt perceives in Frankenstein
the desire to father himself. She puts the idea, as I do, in
feminist terms: "the Gothic adds an extra dimension, a profound
resentment of the sources of one's being, especially the female
sources, stemming from the desire to be one's own source -- and
goal" (65).

11. One cannot, of course, ignore that the
creature murders several innocent victims. But, first, within
the logic of the text, he seems justified -- his suffering spurs
him on. Second, his killing isn't misogynistic -- men as well as
women fall at his hands.